Ocala Shrine Rodeo celebrates silver anniversary with royalty

BY RICK ALLENSTAR-BANNER

Thursday

Aug 30, 2007 at 12:01 AM

The Ocala Shine Rodeo will offer the array of competition Friday and Saturday nights and Sunday afternoon. Sunday - Kids Day - also features a mock rodeo at 1 p.m. for children who've been helped by the Shriners and their hospitals.

At age 7, Melissa Sue Scott was a once and future princess.
A couple years earlier she was lucky to be alive. Yet she was alive, a beneficiary of treatment for severe burns over most of her young body at the Shriners' burn center in Cincinnati.
A resident of Summerfield in 1983, she was selected by local Shriners to be the princess presiding over their brand-new fundraising vehicle - a rodeo.
Now answering to Melissa Sue Formella, the first princess returns this weekend - as grand marshal of the annual Labor Day weekend rodeo's silver anniversary.
A Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association-sanctioned event, the Ocala Shine Rodeo will offer the array of competition Friday and Saturday nights and Sunday afternoon. Sunday - Kids Day - also features a mock rodeo at 1 p.m. for children who've been helped by the Shriners and their hospitals.
In 1984, Melissa Sue excitedly told an interviewer: "I get to watch the rodeo." Today, the 32-year-old with children of her own says: "I feel very special for what the Shriners have done for me."
For one, a career path: Earlier this year, she graduated from Central Florida Community College as a registered nurse and now works at Munroe Regional Medical Center.
"I'd love to work at a Shriner hospital; there's one in Tampa, but my husband doesn't think we can move right now," Formella adds.
Over its 24 years, the Shrine Rodeo at the Southeastern Livestock Pavilion has raised nearly $1.3 million to benefit Shriners hospitals, says this year's rodeo chairman, Bud Davison.
All of that goes into a $750 million annual budget to operate 22 hospitals around the United States. Children with severe burns, spinal cord injuries and orthopaedic or mouth-palate deformities are treated without charge, including transportation and housing for family.
"We're just a little drop in the bucket," says Larry Koblentz, a past potentate of the Ocala Shrine Club.
According to the Shriners Hospitals' Web site, in 2006 the network treated nearly 129,000 patients providing about a million medical procedures and treatments. In nearly 85 years, the hospitals have cared for more than 835,000 children.
The numbers include nearly 240 children living in Marion County and parts of Alachua and Levy counties.
"Kids are our serious business," Davison says. "Basically we're centered around the children."
Children such as Melissa Sue, who was living near Chattanooga, Tenn., in January 1981 when she was severely burned days before her fifth birthday.
"I was outside playing with my step-siblings," she recalls. "I went around the house to get a big plastic bag of toys. On the way back I found a lighter.
"I was 5, and I started playing with it," she continues. "It caught the bag of toys on fire. There was a can of gasoline near me and it blew up."
Third-degree burns covered more than 85 percent of her body; doctors gave her little chance of survival. She spent half a year in the Shriners Cincinnati Burn Unit. Then there was a series of reconstructive surgeries. Formella still bears scars.
"My main concern was my birthday," she says. "So the nurses in the burn unit had a big party for me and got me big ol' Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy dolls."
Months later she moved to Summerfield to live with grandparents. Because she was one of a few Shriner patients living locally at the time, she was selected as princess.
But the rodeo almost never happened at all.
When Ruben Lamb, a third-generation Florida cowboy, first suggested in 1982 a rodeo as a way for the local club to raise money for the hospitals, members weren't too keen on the idea.
"It was risky, and we didn't have any money we could lose," Lamb recalls.
In 1983 they gave it a go.
The rodeo raised $30,000.
But something was lacking, Lamb says. "We didn't treat Melissa Sue much like a princess."
That's not how she remembers it: "I recall a lot of activity. There was a lot of attention, a lot of fun; it was very special being honored. It was a very special time."
Melissa Sue was selected rodeo princess again the following year - and this time, Lamb says, she was regaled in royal fashion.
A couple of years after Melissa Sue's reign, a young Buckaroo was selected along with a princess. Buckaroos and princesses are chosen from the ranks of Shriner-assisted children in the area.
"My advice to them?" Formella says. "Follow your dreams, believe in yourself and just be strong. You are who you make yourself."
Rick Allen can be reached at rick.allen@starbanner.com or 867-4122.

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